Follow our Journey! Day 1!!!

Zennifer · #1 (**permalink**) 06-26-2007, 06:23 PM

Okay, so we have a 7 month old now, who we have been gently using the 0-4 month strategies, but it's time to move up to OLDER BABIES (p. 89).

I thought it might be helpful for me to write how we go through our sleeping journey with this new little one, who wakes up with every whim - approximately 4-7 times a night, and I AM SOOOOOO SLEEPY ALL THE TIME!!

So here we go! Follow with us as we start our new path with this little one! Feel free to add, or ask your own questions... I just thought I'd get some info flying here seeing as I'm going to be doing this anyway! It worked great for our first DS, so hopefully it will with this guy, too... but I'm not expecting it to be immediate. It took a while with the first guy, but the effects are lasting and MUCH APPRECIATED!

Here we go:

Some people are completely fine with a baby who wakes to feed lots because they don't really wake up when their baby nurses, but for me it wakes me up. So I'm completely woken up every hour or so. This is what we'd like to change.

So, here is our routine so far:

We've had a bath, and a nighttime snack to help with making sure his tummy is full. We're going to put on pajamas, read books, lullabies, and cuddle to sleep. I would like to do it right now at 8pm, but apparently my mom is on her way over. THat's fine because he's actually been going to bed VERY late, so 8pm may not have worked anyway. I could slowly move down 15 minutes every couple of days from 10pm, but I thought I'd just do it this way, with getting him to go to bed when I'd like him to. You have to pick one of the 2 ways, so we're going with this one for now. We have a darkened bedroom (but not too dark) with white noise, and he is in his own crib to start with.
My sleep cues are "Sh sh shhhhh.... sleepy time"

I'm looking over all the stuff to do with nursing at night and even though he nurses frequently at night, I don't think he falls asleep nursing, and I think I scoot away from him and everything. I'm thinking when I nurse him I need to put him back in his crib each time... see if that works. Or maybe try putting the crib back beside the bed again.

Anyway this isn't going to be the best day because we haven't moved right to quiet books and sleep after bath... we've moved to playing around and visiting with nana so it's going to be a bit messed up. So maybe today is more DAY 0!

In any case, I'll let people know how many wakings occured tonight as a starting point!

Zennifer · #2 (**permalink**) 06-28-2007, 06:20 PM

Okay, so I didn't write down exactly WHEN each nightwaking occured, but for that first day, DS woke EIGHT TIMES, pretty much once every hour, meaning that I have NO SLEEP CYCLES TO MY NAME ANYMORE!

Anyway, so that's where we are starting from as we go through the book.

Zennifer · #3 (**permalink**) 07-10-2007, 07:11 PM

So... we've got some issues going on such as separation anxiety and teething, so because of those 2 things, it can make it difficult to get ANY sleep plan to work, but that is why I love this one because it's so gentle.

We had moved the crib into the other room months ago which seemed to work, but now because of the sep. anxiety, we have decided DS seems to have moved back into our bed because he wants to be near us... so we've moved the crib back next to our bed to give us more room, and to slowly start the process of getting him comfortable with the crib so we can start moving it out again. Plus, he seems to think he needs to nurse when he wakes up so seeing as this is our starting point, then it's good to start with getting the crib thing going while he's next to me, instead of continually trying to sneak him back into the other room which isn't working. It might work for others, but not us.

We don't have a nursing-to-sleep problem, so we don't need to work on that, but we do have a little guy who thinks that he needs to nurse when he wakes up, even if he doesn't need to fall asleep doing it... so we've decided for the first part of the night we're going to break the pattern by having DH sleep next to him until about 3am, and he'll cuddle him for all wakings up to that point, and then after that I'll do what I normally do for the rest of the night.... we think it might help him see different ways to get back to sleep to sort of get him out of the habit of always thinking he needs to nurse when he wakes up. It went well last night and it certainly showed me that even though it still wakes me up to hear DH take him and cuddle him, it's certainly not as much of a disturbance to my sleep as having to deal with it myself. DH has often replied to me (when I say how many times I'd woken up the previous night) that he woke up all those times too because he also heard the crying... but really he sees it now that he actually has to get DS to go back to sleep himself a few times that it is truly not the same when you just hear it.

Anyway, it's a start! It's probably going to take me a long time because of the separation anxiety and teething, but in the end it will be worth it!